In reflecting on my past with the help of a number of issues in class, I now realize that, even though my education background has been rather good, my formative years in grade school and high school were definitely exclusive of minority experiences. Not only that, I can see quite clearly how events during these years definitely affected the viewpoints I have had toward minorities, both subconsiously and consciously.
My father was an immigrant to this country. Born in Czecho-Slovakia in 1930, by the age of 10, he began to endure the horrors of World War II in a country that had been torn apart by Hitler at the Munich Pact. Being forced to study German in school, he hated every minute and yearned to be free of this oppressive menace. As the war ended, however, the Soviet influence of the Iron Curtain faced Eastern Europe with the reality of communist governments that were anything but free.
Defiantly refusing to enter the communist-sponsored army at the age of 18, my father escaped from the country with his best friend and ended up in an American camp for displaced persons in West Germany outside of Frankfurt. From there he emigrated to Canada, where he eventually ended up in Toronto working in a glass manufacturing plant, since he had be apprenticed as a glass cutter in Europe. Not satisfied with the work or the profession in Toronto, my father eventually got into the printing business as a linotype operator. There was plenty of work and great demand for his talents. He worked for ethnic daily newspapers, setting type and proofing paginations due to his fluency with Slavic languages. Eventually, he followed his friend to Cleveland, then known as the printing capital of the US.
My father always spoke of the discrimmination he suffered at that hands of others and the struggle he had to learn English and to speak without an accent. He also spoke to us often about hard work and the necessity to do your best in everything, because that is how you can prove your worth and be successful.
After living on the Cleveland/Garfield Heights border until I was half-way through Kindergarten, we moved to the suburbs in March of 1970. It was different overnight. Our apartment in Cleveland was part of a four-family house that my father owned. He continued to own it for the next 40 years. Now we had a spacious yard and a much larger house. Things were much more spread out and there was "elbow room." As my father still owned the other house and rented it out, I remember a few observations about the old neighborhood as the 1970s progressed.
The first was my observation that some people we rented to lived in squalor and didn't care at all for the hard work my father and we children did to fix the house up as best as possible. Although my father tried to rent to the best people possible (and there were some very nice people that lived in those apartments through the years), my most vivid memories were of those whom my father had to evict and who trashed the place, leaving us so much more clean-up to do. I couldn't believe that people would live this way. Secondly, I remember the deterioation of the neighborhood as more and more African-Americans moved in as more and more whites left. My father refused to rent to African-Americans and his explanation of why was evident in the deterioration I witnessed myself in the souteast side of Cleveland as the 1970s and 80s progressed.
Therefore, I was taught that African-Americans were no good. Since I had no positive experiences with them to say otherwise, I grew up with this prejudice. Keep in mind also that I grew up in the Parma-Seven Hills area, which is very ethnic Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, etc. I had no African-American classmates in gradeschool or high school, and these prejudices were simply reinforced by the neighborhood and my classmates. Perhaps the most tragic expression of this was the only African-American I can remember from this time period. He was a grade school student about four grades behind he in school. All I remember was that he was an adopted child and that his family (white) had him baptized in front of the whole school. Unfortunately, the prejudice took over and everyone began to call him "nigger" Nelson, and to this day I cannot recall his first name. The tragedy was that he was only in the school for one year and was probably forced out by the prejudice that was rampant at that time.
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